Not-So-Big Labor Keeps Getting Smaller

Unions: The long slide continues in the private sector, and now even public-sector union ranks are shrinking. A friendly White House can't save a movement that prices its members out of the market.

Organized labor showed last year that it can still come out on the winning side in elections. It got the president it wanted and, in California, engineered a big tax hike on the rich.

But after seeing the latest union membership data, labor leaders have to wonder if 2012 was their last hurrah. They may have a friend in the White House, but they continue to lose the loyalty of American workers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday that union membership fell by 400,000 last year despite a rise of 2.4 million in the total number of people employed. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3%, from 11.8% the year before.

In the private sector, membership dropped to 6.6% from 6.9%. Outside longtime big-labor strongholds such as telecom and the auto industry, unions are no longer significant players in private industry.

Growth has also stalled out in the public sector. Union strength is relatively high here — at 35.9% in 2012 — but it's down from 37% in 2011. In a longer view, it seems that the organizing of government workers hit a ceiling around the turn of the century (membership was 37.3% in 2002) and has failed to break through since then.

If anything, public sector unions are on the retreat. The big story for them in 2012, after all, was the political survival of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker after signing a bill taking away most collective bargaining rights for public workers in the state.

All this was happening in a year that saw Americans re-elect a liberal, labor-friendly Democrat to the White House and increase the Democrats' share of seats in the House and Senate.

Unions weren't politically unpopular in 2012. But they were losing the rank-and-file representation that has always been the source of their political strength.

If this trend continues, they will eventually be neither loved nor hated, just irrelevant.

And whom can they blame but themselves? Four years ago, they could point to the perceived hostility of a Republican administration as the problem.

Since 2009, though, they have had a president who gave them every edge he had the power to provide.

It was Barack Obama who saw to it that the United Auto Workers got favored treatment in the General Motors bankruptcy. It was Obama's National Labor Relations Board that sued Boeing to keep production of the 787 jetliner in union-friendly Washington state.

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